Ceremony (26 page)

The cut in the fence was a good twenty feet wide, large enough for the cattle to find. He walked back to the horse and put away the pliers. He poured water over the raw skin on his hands and drank what was left in the canteen; he pissed one more time.

The moon was bright, and the rolling hills and dry lake flats reflected a silvery light illusion that everything was as visible as if seen in broad daylight. But the mare stumbled and threw him hard against the saddle horn, and he realized how deceptive the moonlight was; exposed root tips and dark rocks waited in deep shadows cast by the moon. Their lies would destroy this world.

The trail was splashed with cow manure, and he reined the mare in frequently to lean down from the saddle to see how fresh it was. The farther west the trail went, the higher it was; the pines were tall and thick, and brushy piñon and cedar filled the spaces between the big trees, blocking out nearly all the light. He walked the mare, letting her find a way along the trail where trees and brush had closed in on both sides. He kept his head low, and his eyes closed for protection against the pine needles and sharp branches.

He stopped on the edge of the clearing. The air was much colder. He had been so intent on finding the cattle that he had forgotten all the events of the past days and past years. Hunting the cattle was good for that. Old Betonie was right. It was a cure for that, and maybe for other things too. The spotted cattle wouldn’t be lost any more, scattered through his dreams, driven by his hesitation to admit they had been stolen, that the land—all of it—had been stolen from them. The anticipation of what he might find was strung tight in his belly; suddenly the tension snapped and hurled him into the empty room where the ticking of the clock behind the curtains had ceased. He stopped the mare. The silence was inside, in his belly; there was no longer any hurry. The ride into the mountain had branched into all directions of time. He knew then why the oldtimers could only speak of yesterday and tomorrow in terms of the present moment: the only certainty; and this present sense of being was qualified with bare hints of yesterday or tomorrow, by saying, “I go up to the mountain yesterday or I go up to the mountain tomorrow.” The ck’o’yo Kaup’a’ta somewhere is stacking his gambling sticks and waiting for a visitor; Rocky and I are walking across the ridge in the moonlight; Josiah and Robert are waiting for us. This night is a single night; and there has never been any other.

In the clearing he expected to see them: some standing, others lying down, the color of their hides reflecting the moon like snow on the mountain peaks. But he found nothing, and at the seventh or eighth clearing he stopped to listen for them; there was only the rattle of the bit as the mare chewed the grass she had sneaked when they stopped. He jerked her head up from the grass to rid her of any ideas she might have about grazing.

His anger excluded everything but the horse. If he did not break her of the habit right now, she would try to get away with it all the time. He remembered the old black gelding: as long as Josiah had been there watching, the old black horse loped slowly around the big corral; it stood patiently while Rocky slid down its shoulder and then boosted Tayo up. But after Josiah went inside the shed to repair bridles, the old horse began to test them. It no longer loped; it trotted. Tayo’s teeth rattled together and he had to grip the wiry mane with both hands; his bottom hurt from bouncing against the sharp backbone; and when it felt the loose reins, the black gelding stopped trotting and walked over to the tender green tumbleweed shoots that grew along the fence. Rocky ran over and handed the reins back up to him, and he yelled at the old horse and kicked both heels into its ribs. It raised its head and seemed surprised for a moment, but Tayo wasn’t strong enough to pull the big head around or keep it away from the weeds; and the gelding went back to nibbling weeds again, acting as if the two little boys were not there. They didn’t want Josiah to know that the old horse had won, because Josiah always said that if they couldn’t make the horse behave, then they had no business riding it. So they pretended they were tired of riding, and let the old horse loose. As it lumbered out of the corral toward the river, they pelted it with rocks and sticks, and Rocky yelled at it. Josiah came out of the shed to see what all the noise was about; he scolded them for throwing rocks at the old horse, but he had a hard time to keep from smiling.

“So that old horse won, huh?” he said, almost laughing. “Even got you throwing rocks and yelling at him.”

He reined the mare in tight and kept his heels hard against her sides to let her know he meant business. Josiah had always shown them how ridiculous violence and anger were; beating the mare would not make the spotted cattle appear.

He stopped at a wide shallow stream and dismounted while the mare drank. She had traveled for hours without water; now she swelled out her sides drinking. She let out a deep sigh when she was finished and shook herself; she was tired. As he led her away from the stream, he felt the muscles in his thighs get shivery, and his knees were tight and sore from hours in the saddle and from kneeling on the rocks to cut the wire. His hands hurt, and his fingers were still swollen with blisters from the pliers. He knew what was happening. In the sky above the clearing, Orion had fallen over the south edge; he was running out of night. His stomach tensed up again. Whatever night this was, he still had a big hole cut in their fence, and he had to find the cattle and get them out before the fence riders found the break. They would be after him then, tracking him, hunting him down as they had hunted the last few bears on the mountain. His chest was aching with anger. What ever made him think he could do this? The woman under the apricot tree meant nothing at all; it was all in his own head. When they caught him, they’d send him back to the crazy house for sure. He was trapped now, tricked into trying something that could never work.

He still had time to get back. He could pull the sections of wire together and twist the strands into place, and then ride like hell off the mountain. They’d never know who did it; they’d blame Mexicans from Marquez. It would be the smartest thing he could do. All the rest—old Betonie and his stargazing, the woman in her storm-pattern blanket—all that was crazy, the kind of old-time superstition the teachers at Indian school used to warn him and Rocky about. Like the first time in science class, when the teacher brought in a tubful of dead frogs, bloated with formaldehyde, and the Navajos all left the room; the teacher said those old beliefs were stupid. The Jemez girl raised her hand and said the people always told the kids not to kill frogs, because the frogs would get angry and send so much rain there would be floods. The science teacher laughed loudly, for a long time; he even had to wipe tears from his eyes. “Look at these frogs,” he said, pointing at the disclored rubbery bodies and clouded eyes. “Do you think they could do anything? Where are all the floods? We dissect them in this class every year.” As the Army doctors had told him: it was all superstition, seeing Josiah when they shot those goddamn Japs; it was all superstition, believing that the rain had stopped coming because he had cursed it.

A strange paralysis accompanied his thoughts; a sudden overwhelming fatigue took hold, and his heart pounded furiously, and he panted trying to walk only a few feet from the place he had tied the mare. His knees buckled, and he fell into the old pine needles and cones under a tree. This was the end. He wouldn’t even be able to try to escape; they would find him collapsed under the tree.

 

His face was in the pine needles where he could smell all the tree, from roots deep in the damp earth to the moonlight blue branches, the highest tips swaying in the wind. The odors wrapped around him in a thin clear layer that sucked away the substance of his muscle and bone; his body became insubstantial, so that even if the fence riders came looking for him with their .30-30s loaded and cocked, they would see him only as a shadow under the tree.

The mountain lion came out from a grove of oak trees in the middle of the clearing. He did not walk or leap or run; his motions were like the shimmering of tall grass in the wind. He came across the meadow, moving into the wind. Tayo watched it with his head against the ground, conscious of pine needles tangled in his hair. He waited for the mare to shy away from the yellow form that moved toward them; but the horse was upwind and did not stir. The eyes caught twin reflections of the moon; the glittering yellow light penetrated his chest and he inhaled suddenly. Relentless motion was the lion’s greatest beauty, moving like mountain clouds with the wind, changing substance and color in rhythm with the contours of the mountain peaks: dark as lava rock, and suddenly as bright as a field of snow. When the mountain lion stopped in front of him, it was not hesitation, but a chance for the moonlight to catch up with him. Tayo got to his knees slowly and held out his hand.

“Mountain lion,” he whispered, “mountain lion, becoming what you are with each breath, your substance changing with the earth and the sky.” The mountain lion blinked his eyes; there was no fear. He gazed at him for another instant and then sniffed the southeast wind before he crossed the stream and disappeared into the trees, his outline lingering like yellow smoke, then suddenly gone.

The horse was stamping her front feet and blowing her nostrils open wide to catch the mountain-lion smell that was on the wind now. Tayo stroked her neck and made sure the rope was tied securely to the tree. He went into the clearing where the mountain lion had stood; he knelt and touched the footprints, tracing his finger around the delicate edges of dust the paw prints had made, deep round imprints, each toe a distinctive swirl. He kept his back to the wind and poured yellow pollen from Josiah’s tobacco sack into the cup of his hand. He leaned close to the earth and sprinkled pinches of yellow pollen into the four footprints. Mountain lion, the hunter. Mountain lion, the hunter’s helper.

He rode the mare west again, in the direction the mountain lion had come from. The sound of the wind in the pine branches and the smell of snow from the mountain made him alert.

At dawn he stopped on a grassy ridge to watch the sun rise; he let the mare graze, part of the cycle of restoration. Inside him the muddy water turmoil was settling to the bottom, and streaks of clarity were slowly emerging. Gathering the spotted cattle was only one color of sand falling from the fingertips; the design was still growing, but already long ago it had encircled him.

When he turned away from the sun to mount the mare, he saw the spotted cattle, grazing in a dry lake flat below the ridge. They were facing southeast, grazing in a herd. They had smelled the horse and rider and were looking up at the ridge; his motion sent them running, with grass still hanging from wet lips. They ran as Robert said they did, wilder than antelope, smarter than elk about human beings. Their memory of people endured long after all other traces of domestication were gone; and he was counting on another instinct: the dim memory of direction which lured them always south, to the Mexican desert where they were born.

 

They ran southeast, in the direction he wanted them to go, with tails straight out behind their manure-stained haunches, running more like deer than cattle, moving from thicket to thicket for cover, avoiding the clearings. They favored trails too low and brushy for horses and riders. He let the mare run far behind them, confident of their direction. The cold air whipped tears in his eyes, but he felt good; they were gathered before him, headed for home. They took the trail they had worn along the fence and followed it east; he watched to be sure none of them circled back, but the old direction was persistent even in the half-grown calves. He slowed the mare to a lope and let the cattle go. The horse was tiring; she had frothy sweat on her shoulders and neck. If he followed the cattle too closely or pushed them too fast, they might break and scatter; they might miss the opening in the fence. He watched them appear briefly, crossing a ridge about a half mile ahead; they had already slowed from a dead run to a trot.

The sky was washed pale blue by the glare of the sun; there were no clouds, but he could feel a strong wind from the west at his back, and he knew there would be storm clouds before noon. In the distance up ahead he occasionally caught glimpses of the cattle, trotting steadily; they appeared in clearings and disappeared into oak thickets again, still following the south boundary fence to the east.

The tension in the muscles of his neck and shoulders unwound with each breath he took. He smiled and patted the mare on the neck; the hair was still damp and stiff with sweat. He slowed her to a walk, confident that the cattle would veer through the break in the fence and continue south down the trail off the mountain plateau. He kicked his boots loose from the stirrups and stretched his legs; the tendons and muscles unlocked from the flexed position of the saddle. He had proved something to himself; it wasn’t as strong as it had once been. It was changing, unraveling like the yarn of a dark heavy blanket wrapped around a corpse, the dusty rotted strands of darkness unwinding, giving way to the air; its smothering pressure was lifting from the bones of his skull.

From the corner of his eye he saw them, at first mistaking them for a strand of his own hair caught by the wind. But when he turned there were two riders approaching from the north. He whipped the mare into a dead run, crouching low over her neck, trying to guide her over the rocky, uneven terrain, down the steep slope of a ridge. They were about a mile away when he first saw them, so he would try to find a deep grove of pine where he could stay until they passed. He strained to see if the cattle were still in sight, wondering if the riders had seen them. The bill of sale in his shirt pocket would mean very little to armed patrolmen chasing a trespasser. He pressed his heels into the mare’s sides to make her run faster, but the lava rock was already scattering from under her feet, and she was fighting to keep her balance. He looked over to see if they were on the hilltop behind him yet; they weren’t, so he reined the mare in, to save some of her strength. He wiped the tears that the wind whipped in his eyes onto the sleeve of his jacket and tried to focus on the ridges and flats ahead, searching for the lava-rock knob and the lightning-struck pine that marked the hole in the fence.